Authors: Robert Cormier
“Listen …” Jerry began but not knowing,
really, how to begin or where. The worst thing in the world—to be called queer.
“
You
listen,” Janza said, cool now, knowing he had struck a vulnerable spot. “You’re polluting Trinity. You won’t sell the chocolates like everybody else and now we find out you’re a fairy.” He shook his head in mock, exaggerated admiration. “You’re really something, know that? Trinity has tests and ways of weeding the homos out but you were smart enough to get by, weren’t you? You must be creaming all over—wow, four hundred ripe young bodies to rub against …”
“I’m not a fairy,” Jerry cried.
“Kiss me,” Janza said, puckering his lips grotesquely.
“You son of a bitch,” Jerry said.
The words hung on the air, verbal flags of battle. And Janza smiled, a radiant smile of triumph. This is what he’d wanted all along, of course. This had been the reason for the encounter, the insults.
“What did you call me?” Janza asked.
“A son of a bitch,” Jerry said, measuring out the words, saying them deliberately, eager now for the fight.
Janza threw back his head and laughed. The laughter surprised Jerry—he’d expected retaliation. Instead, Janza stood there utterly relaxed, hands on his hips, amused.
And that was when Jerry saw them. Three or
four of them emerging from bushes and shrubbery, running, crouched, keeping themselves low. They were small, pigmy-like, and they moved so swiftly toward him that he couldn’t get a good look at them, saw only a smear of smiling faces, smiling evilly. More coming now, five or six others, slipping into view from behind a cluster of pine trees, and before Jerry could gird himself for a fight or even raise his arms in defense, they were swarming all over him, hitting him high and low, tumbling him to the ground as if he was some kind of helpless Gulliver. A dozen fists pummeled his body, fingernails tore at his cheek and a finger clawed at his eye. They wanted to blind him. They wanted to kill him. Pain arrowed in his groin—somebody had kicked him there. The blows rained upon him without mercy, with no let-up, and he tried to curl up and make himself small, hiding his face but somebody was pounding his head furiously,
stop, stop
, another kick in his groin and he couldn’t hold down the vomit now, it was coming and he tried to open his mouth to let it spray forth. As he threw up, they let him go, someone yelled “Jesus” in disgust and they withdrew. He could hear their gasps, their running feet receding although somebody stayed behind to kick him again, this time in his lower back, the final sheet of pain that drew a black curtain over his eyes.
SWEET, SWEET IN THE DARK, SAFE. Dark and safe and quiet. He dared not move. He was afraid that his body would come loose, all his bones spilling out like a building collapsing, like a picket fence clattering apart. A small sound reached his ears and he realized it was himself, crooning softly, as if he were singing himself a lullaby. Suddenly, he missed his mother. Her absence formed tears on his cheeks. He hadn’t cried at all from the beating, had lain there on the ground for a few moments after the brief blackout, and then had dragged himself up and made it agonizingly to the locker room at school, walking as if on a tightrope and one misstep would send him hurtling into depths below: oblivion. He’d washed himself, cold water like liquid fingernails inflaming the scratches on his face. I won’t sell their chocolates whether they beat me up or not. And I’m not a fairy, not a queer. He had stolen away from the school,
not wanting anyone to witness his painful passage down the street to the bus stop. He kept his collar up, like a criminal, like those men in newscasts being herded into court. Funny, somebody does violence to you but you’re the one who has to hide, as if you’re the criminal. He shuffled to the back of the bus, grateful that it wasn’t one of the crowded school buses but a maverick bus that appeared at odd hours. The bus was full of old people, old women with blue hair and big handbags and they pretended not to see him, sailing their eyes askew from him as he stalked to the rear of the bus, but their noses wrinkled as they caught the smell of vomit when he passed. Somehow, he’d made it home on the jolting bus, made it to this quiet room where he now sat, sun bleeding low in the sky and spurting its veins on the den window. Dusk moved in. After a while, he took a warm bath, soaking in the water. Then he sat in the dark, quiet, letting himself mend, not stirring, feeling a dull ache settle in his bones now that the first waves of pain had moved away. The clock struck six. He was glad that his father was on the evening shift, at work until eleven. He didn’t want his father to see him with these fresh cuts on his face, the bruises. Make it to the bedroom, he urged himself, undress, curl into cool sheets, tell him I came home sick, must be
a virus, twenty-four-hour flu, and keep my face hidden.
The telephone rang.
Oh no, he protested.
Let me alone.
The ringing continued, mocking him the way Janza had mocked him.
Let it be, let it be, like the Beatles sang.
Still ringing.
And he saw suddenly that he must answer. They didn’t want him to answer this time. They wanted to think that he was incapacitated, injured, unable to make it to the phone.
Jerry lifted himself from the bed, surprised at his mobility, and made his way through the living room to the phone. Don’t stop ringing now, he said, don’t stop ringing. I want to show them.
“Hello.” Forcing strength into his voice.
Silence.
“I’m here,” he said, shouting the words.
Silence again. Then the lewd chuckle. And the dial tone.
“Jerry … oh Jerry …”
“Yoo hoo, Jerree …”
The apartment Jerry and his father occupied was three floors above street level and the voices calling Jerry’s name reached him faintly, barely penetrating the closed windows. That distant
quality also gave the voices a ghostly resonance, like someone calling from the grave. In fact, he hadn’t been certain at first that his name was being called. Slouched at the kitchen table, forcing himself to sip Campbell’s Chicken Broth, he heard the voices and thought they were the sound of kids playing in the street. Then he heard distinctly—
“Hey, Jerry …”
“Whatcha doing, Jerry?”
“Come on out and play, Jerry.”
Ghostly voices from the past recalling when he was a little boy and the kids in the neighborhood came to the back door after supper calling him to go out and play. That was in the sweet time when he and his parents lived together in the house with the big backyard and a front lawn his father never got tired of mowing and watering.
“Hey, Jerry …”
But these voices calling now were not friendly after-supper voices but nighttime voices, taunting and teasing and threatening.
Jerry went into the living room and looked down cautiously, careful not to be seen. The street was deserted except for a couple of parked cars. And still the voices sang.
“Jerree …”
“Come out and play, Jerry …”
A parody of those long ago childhood pleadings.
Peering out again, Jerry saw a shooting star in reverse. It split the darkness and he heard the dull plunk as a stone, not a star at all, hit the wall of the building near the window.
“Yoo hoo, Jerree …”
He squinted at the street below but the boys were well hidden. Then he saw a spray of light sweeping the trees and shrubs across the street. A pale face flared in the darkness as the ray of a flashlight caught and held it for a moment. The face disappeared in the night. Jerry recognized the plodding gait of the building custodian who evidently had been drawn out of his basement apartment by the voices. His flashlight swept the street.
“Who’s there?” he shouted. “I’m gonna get the police …”
“Bye, bye, Jerry,” a voice called.
“See you later, Jerry.” Fading into the dark.
The telephone ruptured the night. Jerry groped upward from sleep, reaching for the sound. Instantly awake, he glanced at the alarm clock’s luminous face. Two-thirty.
Painfully, his muscles and bones protesting, he lifted himself from the mattress and poised, on one elbow, to thrust himself from the bed.
The ringing persisted, ridiculously loud in the stillness of the night. Jerry’s feet touched the floor and he padded toward the sound.
But his father was already at the phone. He glanced toward Jerry and Jerry drew back into the shadows, keeping his face hidden.
“Madmen loose in the world,” his father muttered, standing there with his hand on the phone. “If you let it ring, they get their kicks. If you answer, they hang up and still get their kicks. And then start all over again.”
The harassment had taken its toll on his father’s face, his hair disheveled, purple crescents under his eyes.
“Take the phone off the hook, Dad.”
His father sighed, nodded assent. “That’s giving in to them, Jerry. But what the hell. Who are
them
, anyway?” His father lifted the receiver, holding it to his ear for a moment, then turned to Jerry. “The same thing, that crazy laugh and then the dial tone.” He placed the receiver on the table. “I’ll report it to the telephone company in the morning.” Peering in at Jerry, he said, “You okay, Jerry?”
“Fine. I’m just fine, Dad.”
His father rubbed his eyes, wearily.
“Get some sleep, Jerry. A football player needs his sleep.” Trying to keep it light.
“Right, Dad.”
Compassion for his father welled in Jerry. Should he tell his father what it was all about? But he didn’t want to involve him. His father had
given in, taken the receiver off the hook, and that was defeat enough. He didn’t want him to risk more.
In bed once more, small in the dark, Jerry willed his body to loosen, to relax. After a while, sleep plucked at him with soft fingers, soothing away the ache. But the phone rang in his dreams all night long.
“JANZA, can’t you do anything right?”
“What the hell are you talking about? By the time we got through with him, he’d been willing to sell a million boxes of chocolates.”
“I mean those kids. I didn’t tell you to make it a gang bang.”
“That was a stroke of genius, Archie. That’s what I thought it was. Let him get beat up by a bunch of kids. Psychological—isn’t that what you’re always talking about?”
“Where’d you get them? I don’t want outsiders involved in this?”
“Some animals from my neighborhood. They’d beat up their own grandmothers for a quarter.”
“Did you use the queer pitch on him?”
“You were right, Archie. You called it beautiful. That really spaced him out. Hey, Archie, he isn’t queer, is he?”
“Of course not. That’s why he blew up. If you want to get under a guy’s skin, accuse him of
being something he isn’t. Otherwise, you’re only telling him something he knows.”
The silence on the phone indicated Emile’s appreciation of Archie’s genius.
“What’s next, Archie?”
“Let’s cool it, Emile. I want to keep you in reserve. We’ve got some other stuff going now.”
“I was just starting to enjoy myself.”
“You’ll have other chances, Emile.”
“Hey Archie.”
“Yes, Emile.”
“How about the picture?”
“Suppose I told you there was no picture, Emile? That there was no film in the camera that day …”
Wow, that Archie. Full of surprises. But was he kidding around? Or telling the truth?
“I don’t know, Archie.”
“Emile, stick with me. All the way. And you can’t go wrong. We need men like you.”
Emile swelled with pride. Was Archie talking about The Vigils? And was there really no photograph after all? What a relief that would be!
“You can count on me, Archie.”
“I know that, Emile.”
But after he’d hung up, Emile thought: Archie, that bastard.
SUDDENLY, HE WAS INVISIBLE, without body, without structure, a ghost passing transparently through the hours. He’d made the discovery on the bus going to school. Eyes avoiding his. Looking away. Kids giving him wide berth. Ignoring him, as if he wasn’t there. And he realized that he really wasn’t there, as far as they were concerned. It was as if he were the carrier of a terrible disease and nobody wanted to become contaminated. And so they rendered him invisible, eliminating him from their presence. All the way to school he sat alone, his wounded cheek pressed against the cool glass of the window.
The chill of morning hurried him up the walk to the school entrance. He spotted Tony Santucci. Purely from instinct, Jerry nodded hello. Tony’s face was usually a mirror, reflecting back whatever greeted him—a smile for a smile, a frown for a frown. But now he stared at Jerry. Not really stared. Actually, he wasn’t looking at Jerry but
through
him as if Jerry were a window, a
doorway. And then Tony Santucci fled the scene, into the school.
Jerry’s progress through the corridor was like the parting of the Red Sea. Nobody brushed against him. Guys stepped out of his path, giving him passage, as if reacting to some secret signal. Jerry felt as though he could walk through a wall and emerge untouched on the other side.
He opened his locker—the mess was gone. The desecrated poster had been removed and the wall scrubbed clean. The sneakers were gone. The locker had an air of absence, of being unoccupied. He thought, maybe I should look in a mirror, see if I’m still here. But he was still here, all right. His cheek still stung with pain. Staring at the inside of the locker, like looking into an upright coffin, he felt as though someone was trying to obliterate him, remove all traces of his existence, his presence in the school. Or was he becoming paranoid?
In the classrooms, the teachers also seemed to be part of the conspiracy. They let their eyes slide over him, looking elsewhere when Jerry tried to catch their attention. Once, he waved his hand frantically to answer a question but the teacher ignored him. And yet it was hard to tell about teachers—they were mysterious, they could sense when something unusual was going on. Like today. The kids are giving Renault the freeze so let’s go along with it.